Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.
Interpretation
The quote discusses how American culture assimilates marginalized stories into its broader narrative.
Riz Ahmed highlights the ability of American culture to embrace and normalize stories from marginalized communities, like those represented in 'Glee' for the gay identity or Martin Scorsese's work focusing on Italian-Americans. He points out that these narratives are not only accepted but also become part of the mainstream American story, indicating a shift in cultural perception and integration.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about representation in media during a cultural studies class.
I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.
No one's of Pakistani origin in any British show. That's why every actor of color is here working in the States. It's true.
Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.
Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.
As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.
I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.
From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.
The priest has just baptized you a Christian with water; and I baptize you a Frenchman, daring child, with a dewdrop of champagne on your lips.
The transgender community has always been a part of Hawaiian society, where people who don't conform to the binary system of man/woman, masculine/feminine are accepted or, at minimum, tolerated.
We Americans are childish about our celebrities and icons. We worship, then we denounce; we identify passionately with them and then, if they do something - anything - we dislike, we cast them off.
Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.
Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
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